FYI: Apple isn't making your iPhone slower on purpose

Don't believe the rubbish about Apple purposefully making your iPhone run slower to force you to buy a new one. Why? Because, like I said, it's rubbish. I'm not saying that Apple doesn't want you to upgrade – it does. But to say that the reason your iPhone gets slower over time is because Apple is making it slow down on purpose is just plain silly.

Each year, Apple releases a new iOS, the operating system that runs on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. If your phone is two or three years old, there's a chance updating to the new software will make your iPhone slower. See: iOS 8 preview

On 26 July, The New York Times published a piece by Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of economics at Harvard. The piece highlights research from a Harvard Ph.D student that shows that, each time a new iPhone is released, the term "iPhone slow" sees a spike in Google Search. Of course, each time a new iPhone is released, so is a new iOS, which in addition to being available for the latest iPhones, is also available for some older models too.

But the software, understandably, has been optimised for Apple's newest phones. Why would the company cripple its new software in order to cater for three-year-old iPhones when it could make it absolutely amazing for the users of its newest device?

It's not just Apple's software that'll make your older iPhone feel slower either. Don't forget, technology moves fast. Your iPhone 4S has a three year-old processor in it, which might not be advanced enough to handle some of the newer apps that you download from the iOS App Store as smoothly as you'd like. That app might be designed to take advantage of the 64-bit architecture in the iPhone 5S, for example.

The NYT article was picked up by numerous tabloid papers, including The Daily Mail and Metro, but unfortunately the articles published by these papers highlighted the theory that Apple is slowing down your iPhones on purpose, but seemed to miss out some of Mullainathan's other points.

"The spikes show that the feeling doesn't grow gradually; it comes on suddenly in the days after a new phone is released," he says. "Yet that's all it shows: People suddenly feel that their phone is slowing down. It doesn't show that our iPhones actually become slower."

"Hearing about a new release makes you contemplate getting a new and faster phone. And you suddenly notice how slow your old phone is," Mullainathan adds.

The professor attempts to compare the search trend with searches for various Android phones, and finds there are far fewer spikes in searches for slow Android phones than there are for slow iPhones. But one reason of the reasons for this, and even Mullainathan points this one out, is that a much, much smaller percentage of Android users upgrade to the newest version of the operating system compared with the percentage of iPhone users who upgrade, so the spikes would be much less likely to occur in the same way.

"In the benign explanation, a slowdown of old phones is not a specific goal, but merely a side effect of optimising the operating system for newer hardware," Mullainathan continues in his article, and its exactly that explanation that I believe to be true.

Apple even releases small updates to iOS versions if it finds that it is crippling older devices, helping them to recover if customers have been finding them slow and sluggish. Apple doesn't want you to leave it for good, after all.

Now, I'm not saying that Apple isn't guilty at all here. It could make it clearer to potential updaters that getting the new version of iOS could cause their older iPhone to slow down, for example. But everyone seems to love hating on Apple and it's getting pretty boring.

If you find that your iPhone is feeling slow and sluggish, don't go hating on Apple. Yes, it might be time to start thinking about getting a new phone, and perhaps that shouldn't be an iPhone this time if you really believe that Apple's doing this to you on purpose, but it's possible that a simple spring clean could do the trick.

Why I won't switch to Windows Phone:

Back in June, I wrote about my time with the Lumia 630, and lamented the lack of apps available in the Windows Store.

Since then, I've been using the Lumia 1320. It was a dual-purpose test: first to force myself to use a phablet - this thing is huge - and second to really use Windows Phone apps seriously. I'm going to leave the phablet experience for another time and talk here about Windows Phone again.

Much to the surprise of everyone at Tech Advisor and surely plenty of Windows Phone owners, a number of new apps have appeared over the last few months, notably Fitbit.

One of the biggest issues I had with missing apps was that I couldn't use my Fitbit One - nor any other activity tracker - with Windows Phone. Researching the problem I found that even in Windows Phone 8 the Bluetooth stack, as it's known, still wasn't up to scratch. That's fixed in Windows Phone 8.1 (about time, Microsoft), and it has meant that synching with Bluetooth LE devices such as the Fitbit is now possible.

That's no consolation for Nike FuelBand or Jawbone UP owners, though. With a bit of luck, there will be official apps soon as, amazingly, Nike finally released a FuelBand app for Android about a month ago (about time, Nike).

I was also pretty happy to discover that apps for the two banks I bank with are available on the Windows Store. In fact, we've been keeping a list of missing apps for Windows Phone and have been able to cross out about half of them over the last few months. Happy days.

Well. Not quite. The problem, dear reader, is that it isn't enough to be able to tick these apps off our list. Right from the start, Microsoft was keen to boast about numbers. At the launch of Windows Phone 8 in 2012, Joe Belfiore boasted that Windows Phone owners now had access to 46 out of the top 50 apps (he conveniently forgot to mention that it didn't apply to those who bought handsets running Windows Phone 7 because, oh, they wouldn't get the upgrade to Windows Phone 8.)

However, with apps, it's quality over quantity and that's where Windows Phone really falls down for me. I fired up the Y-cam HomeMonitor app expecting exactly the same set of features as on my iPhone. But no. Although I can view the live feed from the camera and watch recorded clips from the cloud service, that's it. There are no options to turn the camera on or off, to enable or disable motion detection, nor mute alerts.

It's a similar story in other apps. Even in the much anticipated Fitbit app, there's no way to re-order or remove the various stats on the home screen - it's a small detail, but it's a theme that seems to run through every app I've used.

It's hard to tell whether I should be blaming Microsoft or the app developers, since some of the features may not be possible due to limitations with Windows Phone 8.1, or it could be that the developers simply aren't putting in as much effort as with iOS.

The bottom line is that, for the user, the experience is inferior to an iPhone in many ways. Don't get me wrong: there are benefits to having Windows Phone 8, such as the ability to pin the London Bridge departures information to the home screen (complete with live tile) rather than merely the app itself. But, after more than two months of using Windows Phone 8.1, I'm itching to go back to iOS.